Ministry of false claims and cheats

Last updated at 08:28 04 December 2006

A new government TV advert targets benefits cheats. A sweaty man working in the catering industry for cash, while collecting welfare benefits, faces two scary-looking inspectors, a man and a woman. Ominously, they switch on a tape recorder.

The doom-laden voiceover says: "Benefit fraud: if you break the law you face an interview under caution and a criminal record."

Isn't this so typical of Labour's approach to government generally and welfare reform in particular? An expensive TV message that is pure anti-climax. Threats of an interview under caution and a criminal record won't frighten anyone.

The Government knows this. So why waste money on so pathetic a message?

Because it gives the appearance of doing something. They're advertising themselves. Selling the idea they're governing us. The ad is just as likely to encourage cheating.

We're not often told how much is being taken by cheats annually, or lost by departmental error, perhaps because it's always a matter of dispute.

The Department for Work and Pensions estimates about 0.5 per cent of its budget. But the National Audit Office considers this a gross under-estimation. Auditor General Sir John Bourne refuses to sign-off the DWP's accounts for this reason.

When he came to power in 1997, Tony Blair - a Tory in all but name - said he was determined to reform the welfare system.

Labour MP Frank Field - acknowledged, even by Tories, to be an expert on the subject - was brought into government as Minister for Welfare Reform. He lasted less than a year after finding the Government didn't share his enthusiasm for reform.

Now Field lectures and writes about the subject. Yesterday, he pointed out that welfare-reform measures adopted by the Government were imported from Clinton-era America.

But the tough rule that made them work there - limiting an individual's welfare benefits to a five-year period - wasn't applied here.

Result: welfare reform worked in America but not in Britain.

You'd think there wasn't a taxpayer in the country who doesn't, to a greater or lesser degree, seeth about the activities of benefit fraudsters.

But many of us employ people who claim benefits, from cash-up-front tradesmen collecting thousands to £5-a-week dog walkers. They might not be available if the state wasn't augmenting their income.

Added to the 5.65 million claiming the Jobseeker's Allowance are the 2.7 million souls on Incapacity Benefit (IB).

In the good old days, before cheating became rife, they might have suffered from injured backs due to industrial injuries or from lungs poisoned by coal dust and asbestos.

Now four out of 10 IB claimants can't work for behavioural reasons, sometimes caused by drugs and alcohol misuse.

How do you begin to disallow the claims of inade-quates who - even if they were sent out to work - would swiftly get themselves sacked?

It's all a fantastic mess. Secretaries of State for Work & Pensions come and go with no discernible progress to report.

The incumbent John Hutton is more famous for what he is alleged to have said about Gordon Brown - "he'd be a **** ing awful Prime Minister", a remark repeated controversially in the Commons by Shadow Chancellor George Osborne - than he is for reforming welfare.

Will the Government (any government) grasp this nettle? The Tories have welfare spokesman MP David Ruffley looking at whether the five-year limit on benefits is feasible, and the possibility of taking the provision of jobs away from inefficient, state-controlled JobCentres.

Blair was told by David Blunkett, when the latter was DWP Secretary, that the Labour Party wouldn't tolerate the American idea of welfare payments being cut off after five years. So the hard rule that made the Clinton reforms work was discarded.

Why does the Blair Government fear this measure? Obviously because they think most claimants are Labour voters.

The bottom line is this. We get more het up about benefit cheats than we do over rich crooks who know how to play the system and have legions of sleazy lawyers advising them - simply because there are more of them.

So the new TV ad informing us that the Government is pursuing benefit cheats is pure spin. Wonder which Labour-friendly ad agency is being paid for it.

'Modest' Nigella

Nigella Lawson is publicising her new Christmas TV show, saying she's anxious not to be seen as a "kitchen blow-up doll" - a sex object for greedy, sex-crazed men who love ogling attractive women handling hot food.

Like Greta Garbo, Nigella always reverses into the limelight - "I vont to be alone… after this picture shoot" - pretending she doesn't know why she fascinates people while simultaneously dolling herself up like a successful Istanbul procuress and pouting into the camera as she roasts dead creatures and heats, beats and chops vegetables into submission.

Second husband Charles Saatchi, the reclusive, modern art collector, plays the shy comedy relief role, his existence lit occasionally by her megawatt ego. What a gal!

But don't you wish she'd give this false modesty a miss? She's a natural for I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! Can you imagine her bush tucker trial?

Having spent the weekend struggling to understand 'antimatter' - the prodigious energy source which, says Professor Stephen Hawking, might blast us to the nearest star in a mere six years, as opposed to 50,000 years by rocket propulsion - I still can't get my head around the notion.

And, you're reading the words of a technically-minded man who, aged 14, removed the broken half shaft from the differential of an Austin 14 car, welded it back together and replaced it (with the help of the even more technically-minded boyhood chum, Reggie Watt) so that we might continue our practice of giving favoured girlfriends a nightmare (for them) drive through Morayshire forestry roads.

Couldn't we first employ anti-matter, whatever it might be, to have Tony Blair retire sooner?

New polls suggest David Cameron is doing well enough as Tory leader but not well enough to defeat Gordon Brown.

Who knows? The ladies are said to prefer Cameron, but Brown's belated joy at fatherhood - with its recent difficulties - might by now have closed the gap. Follow the women is always the cry now, but I don't believe it.

In my own experience, even the most liberated lassies are happy to lean on the advice of men when their material well-being is likely to be affected by getting a voting decision wrong.

The morons who killed ITV

New ITV boss Michael Grade calls the network "a great brand" and praises its employees - as if there was any possibility of him renaming the company Garbage TV and calling its workers a band of bottom-feeding cretins.

"A great brand" is a meaningless cliche. Grade was chosen because he, too, is a brand - a brash, outspoken Jack-the-Lad in late middle-age who wears braces and red socks, used to smoke cigars and whose uncle, Lew, was one of ITV's founders.

Not a great brand, but related to one. Those of us old enough to remember how ITV was founded - licences were allotted to contractors in the regions, in the belief this would encourage the provinces to produce great talent - have reason to be cynical.

The old system worked - Thames and LWT in London, Granada in the North-West, Yorkshire in the North and Anglia in the East all produced great programming - until greedy business morons decided more money could be made if one company gobbled them all up.

They said this had to happen if Britain was to compete internationally. What they meant was it had to happen if they were to make more money.

Governments were bribed and twisted into encouraging this televisual cannabilism, having first told us of the importance of regional diversity. ITV a great brand? A shadow of its former self, more like.

It's pointed out that if William proposes marriage, middle-class Kate - who doesn't have to work - will be swept up by the Royal Family and prepared for her future role as Queen Consort.

(The then-modest earl's daughter, Lady Diana, while awaiting this signal from Charles, had to make do with looking after pre-school children in Pimlico.)

Is Kate's new post a message to William that he'd better get a move on, or she might become a career girl who can't be expected to give up her job when they get married?

I don't know. But here's one thing we - and Kate - can depend upon. The Royal Family is no more organised than the rest of us. Outside of their official engagements, everything that happens is a surprise to them.

But, whatever they do, they know we'll say it's the result of brilliant pre-planning 'Tradition' is something they more or less make up as they go along.

There's no protocol saying William's girlfriend (as opposed to fiancée) can't work in a clothes shop - even if that has the effect of increasing its business to the detriment of its rivals.

Like the rest of us, the Queen, Philip and Charles are waiting to see what happens between William and Kate. They can't be sure which way William will jump, or how Kate might react.

But, whatever happens, they know we'll say it's a consequence of great wisdom, foresight and tradition. Aren't we marvellous?